Most efficient method of detecting/monitoring DOM changes?

I need an efficient mechanism for detecting changes to the DOM. Preferably cross-browser, but if there's any efficient means which are not cross browser, I can implement these with a fail-safe cross browser method.

In particular, I need to detect changes that would affect the text on a page, so any new, removed or modified elements, or changes to inner text (innerHTML) would be required.

I don't have control over the changes being made (they could be due to 3rd party javascript includes, etc), so it can't be approached from this angle - I need to "monitor" for changes somehow.

Currently I've implemented a "quick'n'dirty" method which checks body.innerHTML.length at intervals. This won't of course detect changes which result in the same length being returned, but in this case is "good enough" - the chances of this happening are extremely slim, and in this project, failing to detect a change won't result in lost data.

The problem with body.innerHTML.length is that it's expensive. It can take between 1 and 5 milliseconds on a fast browser, and this can bog things down a lot - I'm also dealing with a large-ish number of iframes and it all adds up. I'm pretty sure the expensiveness of doing this is because the innerHTML text is not stored statically by browsers, and needs to be calculated from the DOM every time it is read.

The types of answers I am looking for are anything from the "precise" (for example event) to the "good enough" - perhaps something as "quick'n'dirty" as the innerHTML.length method, but that executes faster.

EDIT: I should also point out that whilst it would be "nice" to detect the precise element that has been modified, it is not an absolute necessity - just the fact that there has been any change would be good enough. Hopefully this broadens people's responses. I'm going to investigate Mutation Events, but I still need a fallback for IE support, so any whacky, creative, outside-of-the-square ideas would be very welcome.

To bring this up to date, the DOM4 standard does away with Mutation Events and replaces them with Mutation Observers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObserver

http://www.quirksmode.org/js/events/DOMtree.html

jQuery now supports a way to attach events to existing and future elements corresponding to a selector: http://docs.jquery.com/Events/live#typefn

Another interesting find - http://james.padolsey.com/javascript/monitoring-dom-properties/

Mutation events are the W3 recommendation of what you are looking for..

Not sure if they are supported all around.. (IE will most likely not support them..)

You could try using the DOMNodeInserted and DOMNodeRemoved events. Acording to Quirksmode, they kind of work in most browsers, with the notable exception of IE...

http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/events/index.html

I have recently written a plugin that does exactly that - jquery.initialize

You use it the same way as .each function

$(".some-element").initialize( function(){
	$(this).css("color", "blue"); 
});

The difference from .each is - it takes your selector, in this case .some-element and wait for new elements with this selector in the future, if such element will be added, it will be initialized too.

In our case initialize function just change element color to blue. So if we'll add new element (no matter if with ajax or even F12 inspector or anything) like:

$("<div/>").addClass('some-element').appendTo("body"); //new element will have blue color!

Plugin will init it instantly. Also plugin makes sure one element is initialized only once. So if you add element, then .deatch() it from body and then add it again, it will not be initialized again.

$("<div/>").addClass('some-element').appendTo("body").detach()
    .appendTo(".some-container");
//initialized only once

Plugin is based on MutationObserver - it will work on IE9 and 10 with dependencies as detailed on the readme page.

jQuery Mutate does this too, by default it supports like height, width, scrollHeight etc... but it also can be extended with a little bit of extra code to add new events like see if text has changed etc...

http://www.jqui.net/jquery-projects/jquery-mutate-official/

Hope it helps